Located in Newark, QXT's Night Club is one of the leading alternative night club on East Coast. They specialize in playing cutting edge dark electronic and alternative dance music.

Aristide Economopoulos | For NJ.com

By Gianluca D'Elia | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

QXT's Night Club is hidden in plain sight. Thousands of people walk past its flame-adorned front door every week, be it en route to Newark's federal and municipal courthouses just across Mulberry Street or to see Devils hockey or massive arena concerts at the Prudential Center a block away.

Most of those people have no idea that one of the East Coast's most prominent alternative nightclubs is right in front of them, blasting darkwave music, hosting live shows of its own and drawing a crowd of partiers donning pale makeup, spiky jewelry and fishnets. Every weekend, fans of the old Brick City haunt — now in its 27th year — make the trip in from the suburbs and even New York City and Philadelphia to enjoy an atmosphere they struggle to find elsewhere.

Sounds like the perfect place for a rowdy Halloween weekend, right?

I spent my "Halloweekend" Friday night at QXT’s with a friend from college. Neither of us follow alternative subculture but we do love Halloween, so hanging with those who dig the ghoulish holiday, too, was where we wanted to be.

However, not everyone is dressed like a ghoul or a vampire, so fitting in is easy. The first people we talked to were a drag queen and a recent U.S. Army veteran sitting a few seats down from her at the bar, which was lit by a wall of multicolored drip candles.

“Being a part of a group of other people who like the same music and didn't care how I dressed or put on makeup was a selling point,” said Paul Lasko, a regular at the bar. “We're able to express our individual style without odd looks.”

Lasko is a rock musician who’s not afraid to sport a mohawk, but by day, he’s a firefighter and the former emergency management coordinator in Bound Brook.

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A women dances near an altar of candles near the main dance floor.

Aristide Economopoulos | For NJ.com

Sure, you can be as odd as you want here, but if you tell a regular it's your first time at QXT's, the first thing they'll tell you it’s a safe space where you can be yourself, dance without feeling self-conscious and make some new friends along the way.

"If you come in, you’re not going to leave the building without making friends, and it’s not just because you’re drinking," owner Rolando Manna, of Closter, said.

He's right. I rarely go to nightclubs — Netflix is usually my preferred social space — but the night I went to QXT's was the first time I was genuinely sad to be leaving a club. As we headed back to my car, my friend turned to me and said, "Why is everyone here so stinkin' nice?"

As we sat at the bar, New York City-based drag queen and QXT’s regular Jacqueline Dupree recalled the first time she visited.

“When I started coming here, I thought 'what am I getting into?'” she said. "But the second I got here, I got out of that fear.”

“People come in here looking like vampires, so I could care less what they’re thinking about me,” said Dupree, who stood out from the crowd in a black and white gown, wearing a white flower in her hair and a lavish amount of glitter on her face.

Before the goth crowd began to trickle in, we caught the tail end of a weekly happy hour karaoke session, which Dupree hosted. Later in the night, the sounds of industrial, goth and rock would fill the building, but when we first arrived, “No Tears Left to Cry” by Ariana Grande had just been queued up on the karaoke machine, and it was followed by “Human Nature” by Michael Jackson.

“The theme here is goth but not everyone falls into that label,” said Dave Wreck, of Queens, New York. “We don’t really have any labels. There’s no pretentious B.S.”

It's all part of the inclusive atmosphere the bar tries to offer, Manna said.

"The reason we have live music and karaoke nights is because we want people to create when they come here, and we want to evolve diverse clientele," he said.

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Friends party together on QXT's main dance floor.

Aristide Economopoulos | For NJ.com

The club, which is only open Thursday night through Saturday night, is known for its burlesque and '80s and '90s theme nights — and a 2000s night coming up in November — as well as its live performances by artists and bands spanning different musical genres. Canadian goth duo Strvngers is coming on Nov. 3, and rapper Slick Rick is coming Nov. 10.

Regardless of what music is playing, it seems there's something for everyone.

"Hearing the new wave and dark wave songs from the 1980s is a real treat," said Robert Woll, of Belleville, a regular at the club. "I never really notice those songs actively being played anywhere else."

Lasko added: "Music is what really is the force of the club. It's what binds everyone together at QXT's regardless of which genre they gravitate toward the most."

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Friends chat at the upstairs bar.

Aristide Economopoulos | For NJ.com

Manna’s in-laws first bought the space, which used to be a Spanish restaurant called Don Quixote's — hence the club's abbreviated name, QXT — in 1993. He and his wife Susana have owned it for the past three years. The club also briefly went by the name “The Edge” for a couple of years before becoming QXT's permanently in 1995.

At the same time, a new crop of gothic-leaning artists like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson were becoming popular. The club's deejays started playing their tracks, and from there, the goth crowd started to follow, said manager Damian Hrunka, who goes by Damian Plague when he’s deejaying at the club — a job he's done for 20 years now, he tells me.

"Even when I first walked in here, it always had a big mix of alternative, new wave and 80s," Hrunka said. "But they also threw in reggae in the basement sometimes, and it became a place where everyone could congregate and hear a little bit of everything."

The club has also become a staple of Newark’s arts scene, hosting art galleries and open mics regularly.

“I think what we’ve done well over the last two or three years is that we’ve opened the doors so the community gets to enjoy QXT’s more than before," he said. "The local community that’s very inclined to the arts and music is finding a forum they didn’t have before.”

It's especially important to maintain a strong community connection in a time when night clubs seem to be dwindling, Manna said.

"The nightclub business is dying out," he said. "I think it’s a generational transformation. When we grew up in 1980s, the idea was to go out and engage, talk and meet people. People don’t go out as much as before.

"Five years from now, who knows," Manna said, his sentence trailing off.

As the hour grew late Friday night, the crowd was steadily filing in: a woman in a dark medieval-like dress breezed past us, a couple in steampunk-inspired getups appeared later on, and it did not appear as though they only dressed for Halloween — they were dressed for QXT's.

“We’ve always stuck to our guns and not been afraid of what people think,” Hrunka added. “A lot of people misjudge a darker scene, but once you get somebody through the doors here, they love it.”